FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2015

As always I’ll never really know about this lot. Fifty titles at those prices makes an

impossible target. There are times when you wonder are these really the pick of the year’s

offering? I was well on the way to regarding the event as a way to throw fifteen dollars a

movie into the void. Then it came good. I got two exceptional films in the same day.

Loin des hommes/ Far from Men starts off predictably with Vigo Mortensen as the Post WW2 Algerian school teacher saddled with the job of taking murderer local Reda Kateb (Zero Dark Thirty) to the gendarmerie, a day’s march down the desert road. Oh no - more growing mutual respect! Well they do go that way but, as they fill in the two central characters and the pair get involved with local militias and the French army, it becomes clear that this is something more thoughtful and impressive than we are used to. Great‘Scope images. Angela Molina doing a walk-on.

Then they slapped on Diplomatie/ Diplomacy, the enduring Volker Schlondorf’s film of the hit play about the Swedish Consul Nordling talking General Dietrich von Choltitz, German occupation commander, out of leveling Paris, as the Krauts lose WW2. This delivers two great parts to André Dusolier and Niels Arestrup, who come through brilliantly. Factually suspect but dramatically superior, introducing elements like the story of Abraham and Dusolier’s rousing hypothetical. All the reviewers seem to have forgotten René Clement’s 1966 version Is Paris Burning? The actual “Paris brûle-t-il?” ‘phone call doesn’t even figure here.

Arestrup: Diplomatie

Benoit Jaquot’s 3 Coeurs/ Three Hearts looked like a safe bet with Benoît Poelevoorde, Charlotte Gainsbourg , Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve but it’s a mis-judged and uninvolving account of frustrated passion. Mlle Deneuve struck out again in the once great André Techiné’s equally ambitious L’Homme qu’on aimait trop/ French Riviera treating a celebrated, inconclusive murder trial. Guillaume Cantet and Adele Haenel get involved in Casino politics at ponderous length and, making Catharine zero for three, we get the glum Dans la cour/ In the Courtyard from Pierre Salvadori  trying to revive the Crime de M.Lange, Du Haut en bas apartment block cycle.

Melanie Laurent is staking out relationship cinema with her second feature as director Respire/Breathe covering a teenage school girl friendship that goes South in soft ‘scope close-ups. David Bailey, Les amitiés particulières and the current stressed family cycle swirl around. It takes a while for any narrative to form and the ending is a lurch into melo but Laurent is feeling her way towards something substantial.

Someone must have thought that if people were prepared to watch decadence for 142 min. in La grande bellezza, they could take a hundred and fifty of Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent, glamor with a sprinkling of nudity and luxury historical reconstruction - actuality and fashion in a split screen.  You’ve got to wonder about a film where the clothes are the best element. Gaspard Ulliel and Jeremy Renier deserve better.

Loin des hommes; Kateb & Mortensen

The Intouchables team of  Olivier Nakache &  Eric Toledano's new Samba fielded that movie's imposing Omar Sy opposite Charlotte Gainsbourg, a winning combination tied to the promising plot of her freaked-out Parisian social worker processing his illegal Senegalese immigrant.  This pair register (love Charlotte dancing shoeless) but they get buried in a welter of complications and sub-plots which makes the film outstay it's welcome.

Le Dernier Diamant/ The Last Diamond is probably the best of Eric Barbier's glossy thrillers. Bérénice Bejo demonstrates that she can do the whole glamor star thing to the point where we feel someone more charismatic than the glum Yvann Attal should be squiring her through this twisty, polished heist piece about stealing a legendary cursed yellow diamond. Pretty good and would be better without the limp ending.

Bejo's The Artist co-star magistrate Jean Dujardin and gangster Gilles Lelloche compete in being lantern jawed as opposing hard men in La French/The Connection  big budget, long crime piece in an attractive seventies Marseilles setting.  At regular intervals someone gets whacked loudly but that only momentarily gets back wandering attention.

Lisa Azuelos’ elegant Une rencontre/ Quantum Love /Chance Meeting is determinedly female &  determinedly escapist. Mature author Sophie Marceau and lawyer Cluzet get along a treat, leading to a variety of fantasies of which the most striking has them naked together in the bed he is sharing with Azuelos, doing double duty playing his wife. Beautiful people, beautiful homes and locations - the Paris bridge with the lovelocks, London red busses. After you realize it’s all froth, attention wanders.

Tonie Marshall has done better than Tu Veux out tu veux pas/ Sex Love & Therapy where relations councilor Patrick Bruel hires Sophie again to sit in on his sessions and we get a lot of will they or won’t they.  I was thinking of setting up cloud funding to buy her new underwear after she showed up a second time in those same black scanties.

The cast made Anne le Ny's On a failli être amies/Almost Friends seem like a good proposition. Nice titles, sharp bright colours, attractive settings and personable players deserve better.  Emanuelle Devos and Roschdy Zem are pretty much indestructible but the good living fantasy they are involved in is unworthy of them. Divorced Karin Viard is a Skills Assessment officer handling a batch of new unemployeds from the closed local factory. Uneasy among them is Devos, who turns out to own an epicure restaurant  with husband Roschdy.  She keeps on breaking out in an unexplained rash. The two women involve each other in webs of deceit which aren't all that amusing, involving or plausible.                  

Welcome relief came with a germphobic (think Danny Kaye in Up in Arms) Danny Boon

in his own Superchondriac, a very funny farcical piece placing him again opposite Kad

Merad and our first glance of the winning Alice Pol. Think The Interview without the

edge but funnier gags.

It will be interesting to see which of these return for a theatrical run at popular prices and which ones spiral off into movie limbo.

Boob Tube.

There’s an Episode of Parks and Recreation where Amy Poehler’s Leslie wants the council to subsidise the local video store, which looks like closing, while Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson opposes government in the arts at any level and Poehler’s claim that the shop is the community window into culture is undermined by the owner shifting to porn because that’s what his customers want. Every time that she cites something like Rashomon, Adam Scott’s Nick Wyatt interjects “That’s on YouTube.”

Forget about news and current affairs. It’s sitcom where all the great issues are debated.

I always thought of You Tube as source of murky pop music clips and  Stupid Pet Tricks. I however now discover it’s where movies go when they die - a doorway into the lost (to Australians) world of Archives and Cinematheques. It seems likely there’s a lifetime of serious movie viewing there.

This is good news - bad news. With trembling fingers, I put Brigitte Helm’s name in the search bar and up came screens of icons for profane dance clips from Metropolis.

However it didn’t alert me to her presence in  the Karl Hartl/ Walter Reisch Die Gräfin von Monte-Christo with Gustav Mephisto Gründgens and Rudolf Die Driegroschenoper Forster or Carl Grune (now there’s a lost auteur) doing Am rande der welt, where she partners Wilhelm Dieterle. Both films have English captions though the second one looks like it came off a reject 8mm dupe.

If you try Florence Marly (with Ray Milland in Sealed Verdict, Von Stroheim in l'Alibi and Denis Hopper in Queen of Blood or as the Princess in Krakatit) you discover she also did a run of movies in the post war Argentine.

Without any navigation guide, it’s hard to work out just how much material there is - particularly as it’s like the ocean. You should never turn your back on it. The pieces that you click “watch later” frequently aren’t there next day. I had to go through fourteen screens of film noir (!) before I came upon the history-making Peter Cushing-Rudolf Cartier 1984.

The bulk of the foreign language material comes without sub-titles. A lot of it is misidentified and irretrievable. Quite a bit appears to be duped off the tackiest VHS copies in the world. When you get a dissolve, it looks like someone poured soup over the image. This traces back to the suppliers. Watch the trailer for Bicycle Thieves to see the sharpness and range of tones the system is capable of delivering.

This Above All - Tyrone Power & Joan Fontaine

Here is a selection of the feature titles I located. It’s not any kind of best list. It is however a very good match with my wants - just about all pre 1950, because I’ve had better access to anything made since.

Du Haut en bas French G.W.Pabst with Jean Gabin, Michel Simon & Peter Lorre, Myamoto Musashi  WW2 Mizogchi, Mail Train/ Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It Walter Forde with Alistair Sim and Gordon Harker, Ladro Lei, Ladro La  Luigi Zampi, Louise Brooks BBC Doc., Mask of Diijon  Lew Landers/Von Stroheim, Mesalina 1924 silent voice dubbed,  The Guilty Generation - Helen Twelvetrees 1931 sharp, Gyurkovicsarna  Nils Asther 1920, English captions, I’ll Give a Million Hollywood re-make of pre war De Sica, The Love River - Egyptian Omar Sharriff with S/Titles, Strange Impersonation - Anthony Mann B movie anticipates “Dark Passage”, New York Nights - Lewis Milestone 1929, Little Rita in the Far West Rita Pavone/Baldi - good copy, Kiki - Mary Pickford /Cameron  Menzies,  Circonstances Actuantes Arlety 1950, Seas Beneath 1931 John Ford with George O’Brien, Ettore Fieramosa  Blassetti, Svegliati e uccidi  Lizzani, Gloria Brigitte Helm & Gustaf Froelich (use Stummfilm Fan copy), Volga Volga - Grigori Alesandrov, soso quality but English sub-titles, Un Revanant Xtian Jacques/Jouvet scored by Honneger,  This Above All Litvak, O Tesoro/ Der Schatz - Pabst’s first movie, Devdas India 1935 Eng. S/Titles, Little Old New York  King Vidor soso quality, El día que me quieras last and reputedly best of the Spanish speaking Carlos Gardel films made at Astoria, Brothers Karamazov - Fritz Kortner/ Otzep 1931 Eng. S/titles,  Meet Me in St Louis - David Susskind TV version, Le Destin Fabuleux de Desirée Clary Sacha Guitry fair, The Cossacks John Gilbert silent, George Hill-Clarence Brown, Irgendwo in Berlin Post WW2 Fritz Rasp/Lamprecht, Woman to Woman Victor Saville 1929, Albuquerque Randolph Scott & Gabby Hayes in Cinecolor, Crossroads great Kinugasa silent,  Frauennot - Frauenglück  Eisenstein/ Alexandrov, Up the River Humphry Bogart’s first movie, Spencer Tracy/John Ford, Hitlerjunge Quex Nazis 1933 S/Titles.

Of course these are not the only thing the site offers. I find myself following John Stewart, who’s been regrettably missing from our local TV, but the real buzz remains finding access to the history of the movies that traditional coverage omits - think of that  drear British series which takes four hours to reach a screen filling close up of the word “Sound” - without ever a glimpse of a cowboy.

Equally disturbing is the lack off any professional or peer documentation on this You Tube material. Because there is no promotion of the kind for theatrical, broadcast or DVD exploitation of movies, no money changing hands, there’s no incentive to discuss a You Tube discovery.

The question remains why local enthusiasts should have to fossik through the Internet for the privilege of huddling alone over miserable copies of  the output of major movie makers, when it’s taken for granted that big screen presentation of this material is only a Metro ride away in the real world.

Barrie Pattison 2020

GEORGES WOLINSKI 

As no one else seems interested, I’ll point out that Charlie Hebdo victim (and Legion of Honor holder) Georges Wolinski also had a profile as a movie maker including directing Le pays beau (1972 Short) and scripts for  Elles ne pensent qu'à ça... (Charlotte Dubreuil 1994 ) Palace  (TV Series 1988 ) Pizzaiolo et Mozzarel (Christian Gion 1985) Le cowboy (Georges Lautner 1985) Aldo et Junior (Patrick Schulmann 1984) Le roi des cons (Claude Confortès 1981) and commentary for Mario Ruspoli Shorts - La chavalanthrope (1972 ) Chaval (1970).

  

He appeared in Intime conviction (2006 TV Series) Membre du Jury - L'affaire Lio (2006)  Non chiamarmi Omar (1992)  Paulette, la pauvre petite milliardaire (1986)  Aldo et Junior (1984) Vive les femmes! (1984)  Le roi des cons (1981) Le chauffeur de taxi along with being himself in TV news programs and doing the art work for Gerard Pirés Erotissimo.

The cliché is “an iconic presence.”

OLDER & DEEPER IN DEBT 2014.

Another year at the movies. The following titles that I saw for the first time impressed me.

Grand Budapest Hotel

MARLON BRANDO; an actor named desire (Documentary by Phillippe Kohly) FROZEN (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee), DIAZ: Don't Clean Up This Blood (Vicari), Las BRUJAS de ZUGARRA MURDI  (Witching & Bitching: De Iglasea), PHILOMENA, Feuerwerk (Fireworks; Kurt Hoffmann 1954) La classe operaia va in paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven: Petri 1971), KAGYUAMIME NO MONOGATARI (The Tale of Princess Kaguya: Takahata), A SERIOUS MAN (Coens), TRESPASSING BERGMAN (Jane Magnusson, Hynek Pallas), INSIDE LLEWELIN DAVIS, CHAIISAI OUCI ( The Little House:Yôji Yamada), DAST-NEVESHTEHAA NEMISOOAND (Manuscripts Don't Burn: Mohammad Rasoulof), The Grand Budapest Hotel, Always san-chôme

Orlac's Hands: Veidt & Kortner

noyûhi (Always - Sunset on Third Street: Takashi Yamazaki 2005) Jûsan-nin no shikaku (13 Assassins: Miike), The Book Thief (Brian Percival), L'autre Dumas (Safy Nebbou 2010), Der ganz große Traum (The Big Dream: Sebastian Grobler), Calvary (John Michael McDonagh), Win Win (Thomas McCarthy), Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn), Winter Passing (Adam Rapp),  Yôkame no semi (Rebirth: Izuru Narushima), Oblomov (Nikita Mikhalkov 1980), Bai ri yan huo (Black Coal: Yi'nan Diao), Mickey Mouse In Get A Horse! (Lauren MacMullan) Neskolko dney iz zhizni Czlowiek z nadziei (Walesa: Man of Hope: Wajda) Gan  (Wild Geese: Shirô Toyoda 1951) The Wolf of Wall Street, Orlacs Hände (The Hands of Orlac: Robert Wiene 1924), Jersey Boys.

This works out as Two documentaries rating significantly high this year, nine multiplex releases, two on TV, ten at events - festivals, film weeks, ethnic screenings etc, four on DVD, one streamed and one (here's a change) on a plane.

Barrie Pattison.

 Sydney Italian Film Festival 2014

More than thirty new Italian movies in impeccable sub titled digital theatrical copies - sound like film nut bliss? The down side is the cost, to which Palace have made a minor concession issuing season tickets that knock a couple of dollars off a film. To get the prices to a still hefty twelve bucks, you have to buy five, ten or twenty. That makes a bad choice expensive.

.I only worked through part of the schedule at those prices. The films I saw were quite presentable, though I do miss Gian Maria Volonte exposing corruption in high places and Lino Banfi doing fat jokes and there was nothing by Avati or Scola - not even his recent feet-off-the-pedals account of his association with Fellini.

We did get A Lonely Hero/L’intrepido the new movie from heavy hitter Gianni Amelio (Porte Apperte, L’America). Antonio Albanese (traffic cop in To Rome With Love) takes Milan fill-in jobs, while his grown son fails to straighten up and fly right. The location filming is superior, the ending too oblique.

The Mafia Only Kills in Summer/ La Mafia uccide solo d'estate is a distinctive job of mood juggling, juxtaposing Palermo Mafia outrages and the comic story of the kid who grows to be director Pif  and his pursuit of the winning Christina Capotondi. The ending is particularly effective, where he shows his own son monuments to the seventies events which he didn’t understand at the time.

The Worst Xmas of My Life/ Il peggior Natale della mia vita is the sequel to Alessandro
Genovese’s broad Worst Week of My Life, with current Italian star comic Fabio de Luigi’s
character back, starting a family, with Signorina Capotundi again, in Diego Abatuantuono’s
castle.

Those Happy Years/ Anni Felici is the new Daniele Luchetti film, an agreeable addition
to his imposing credits, again recalling the Seventies, when action painter Kim Rossi
Stuart finds wife Micaela Ramazotti demanding the same freedom he exercises with his
models and pairing with Martina Gedek,  observed by the young 8mm. camera owner son.

Christina Capotondi

Blame it On Freud/ Tutta colpa di Freud is another handsome multiple narrative from Paolo Genovese, dealing with the three daughters of shrink Marco Giallini and their love lives. The big romantic moments play well. The people are beautiful, the homes are beautiful and the scenery is beautiful. Two hours of it is like making a meal out of maron glacé.

South Is Nothing/ Il Sud è niente  on the other hand is a murky, enigmatic drama of the Mafia bearing down on Calabria fish shop man Vinicio Marchioni and androgynous daughter Miriam Kalquist. After watching him play a mute in Blame it On Freud, it’s startling to find Marchioni has a deep rich voice.

Marina is the prestige offering, the story of Rocco Granata, Italian singer-accordionist in Belgium, who had the surprise hit in the fifties. Made by Stijn Connix director of Daens, it fields a two dimensional musical biography in which the admirable Luigo Lo Casio and Donatella Finnochario find themselves stranded as rounded characters acting out a persecuted immigrants narrative. Jersey Boys it’s not.

A Lonely Hero - Albanese & Amelio

Turin on the Moon / La Luna su Torino is Davide Ferrario back in the city he determinedly chronicles. Bike riding Giacomo Leopardi is not having much luck with his crumbling family home or fetching tenant Manuela Parodi, in among the tourist attractions. OK.

Sydney Sibilia’s I Can Quit Whenever I Want/ Smetto quando voglio is a broad comedy with an interesting idea that’s already been thrashed in Breaking Bad. The retrenched chemistry professor and his colleagues go into the drug trade complete with king pins, shoot-outs, police stings and rehab. Striking, contrasty reversal colour.

More knockabout with A Boss in the Kitchen/ Un boss in salotto from Luca Minero and

rather more simple minded than his hardly cerebral Welcome to the South. Alleged
Camorista uncle Rocco Papaleo, previously represented as dead, is placed under house
arrest in the suburban home of aspiring ad man Luca Argentero. Suddenly every one
cultivates the family for its mob connection. Agreeable lightweight.

More somber Bruno Oliviero’s The Human Factor/ La variabile umana has the ever
admirable Silvio Orlandi as widower Milan police inspector called back from his desk job
to deal with the murder of a socialite the same night his own sixteen year old daughter is
arrested using his pistol.  Dim scope images slowly record the film’s intriguing, detailed
exposition.

Barrie Pattison

MANUSCRIPTS DON'T BURN

Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoosand/ Manuscripts Don't Burn

Probably the most resonant of the stew of  new releases pouring through the national weeks here is this latest production by Mohammad Rasoulof, still under his twenty year prohibition from film making but out of the jail, where he was sent for undermining the Iranian state with his movies - and now possibly restrained within it’s borders or possibly living in Hamburg, where the interiors of this film were shot. Information is hard to come by.

Local press coverage was predictably non existent and a $35 a head price tag forbidding (must admit the buffet was tasty but they didn’t do free drinks for reasons more ideological than economic). However to the audience that did make it past those barriers, mainly the local Persian community in their best clothes, Manuscripts Don’t Burn is the most confronting film they are likely to encounter. Several Iranian viewers found it irredeemably grim.

 

Commentators squirm away from questioning the appropriateness of using agit prop as up-market entertainment. Here it was clearly the intention of  Rasoulof and his anonymous associates that their work reach a wide international audience via art cinema showing and their straight ahead treatment of secret police activity wipes away even the most sober of what we are used to, films like The Lives of Others or A Most Wanted Man - no bursting through the door pistols at the ready or black clad, absielling SWAT teams here.

Less well know than fellow sentenced director Jafar Panahi, Rasoulof had appeared to be
the lesser artist but this new film is more substantial than any of their earlier work.

The parallel lives of a duo of  assassins and the intellectuals they persecute are shown in
washed out digital colour and scope.

We kick off with  Morteza the driver (reputably Rasoulof  himself) waking in the parked, window fogged car and heading off to pick up a blood stained colleague running from a pursuer. He asks him “Is he dead?” The new comer is more concerned with finding an ATM, needing money for his young son to go into a hospital which won’t accept him without the  fee in advance.

Action switches to a middle class home with washing on a clothes line in the living room, and a poet friend calling on the wheel chain bound husband. When alone, they talk about clandestine book publication. The Net’s more a tool of the hedonist youth, which did not share their forty year old struggle.  They finish their discussion from the down stairs doorway, using the intercom because the ‘phones are tapped. However a headphone wearing surveillance officer is watching from a vehicle with its windows covered.

In an office with a photo of the Ayatollahs on the wall, an official censor strikes out a news paper passage. He visits his one time associate, urging him to turn over a MSS about a ”bus incident” in order to obtain permission to leave the country and see his daughter before he dies. They exchange comments on the censor as a one time dissident himself , who now rejects his past as unpatriotic. The writer reluctantly complies, warning that copies he has distributed will be published if anything happens to him.

The two man hit squad has another assignment, though the ill child’s father wants to go to the hospital. He is refused but their employer uses his influence to have the child admitted. The driver says his associate should thank the man when they meet. Someone is locked in the boot with an improvised hood over his face.

The plot elements connect when they home in on the poet we have already seen, to find copies of the MSS and use him to gain an unobtrusive entry to the wheelchair bound writer’s flat. Their methods are chillingly plausible.

We learn the killer’s back story, which the film connects to an (allegedly genuine) 1995 Heyran Pass incident  when a group dissidents were chosen for elimination by driving their coach  into a ravine. Waiting for a victim to succumb, the hit man makes a sandwich from the contents of the refrigerator and shares it with his colleague.

The assassin father dreams the film’s one fantastic, violent image, himself in the shower with his son, as the water turns bloody.

The argument is detailed. "Fighting and change were 40 years ago. That's over now”, justification under Sharia, the evil “Cultural NATO”,  printed books against the web, the country’s Chain Murders of the nineties, the boy witness, whose fate we never learn, is the same age as the ill child.

We have no way of telling how accurate a depiction of present day Iran we are seeing but the sober, well crafted film making carries conviction. As acts of defiance go this one must come near the top of the list. It should have been on TV at peak hours followed by a panel discussion but  that’s someplace else. I guess without featuring a CIA plot it doesn’t qualify as serious.

 

Horrorshows

 HORRORSHOW.

Australia is already the most parochial film environment in the developed world. No surprise there.  Look at the horror stories that litter the national cinema time line. Think burning Amalgamated's library and the holdings of the ethnic distributors, freighting the lending collection to Melbourne and back at they say a million a time, cancelling the Lillian Gish tour, flogging Cinema Papers to a team unable to get past three shonky issues, the aborted Sydney Quay Cinematheque.

The dismantling of the National Film Theater must be most alarming. It's no accident that that organization's establishment coincided with the development of an Australian feature production industry acknowledged world wide and it's disappearance marked the end of consistently plausible product -  and that is just a side issue.

The money spent on ill informed production alone could have made this country a world leader in cinema savvy. We're only on the third paragraph and were already looking at lost hundreds of millions.

The fact is that film (of which theatrical features are the high water mark) is the major form of expression of the Twentieth Century and on into our own time and that Australians have never had the access to it that people in other places take for granted.  This shows up in areas central to life here - education, entertainment & comment -  as well as production.

The National Film Lending Collection was the one point at which government threw a bone to that sleeping dog. (Pretty good for a mixed metaphor!) While they are poor relations to their real world counterparts, ACMI, the Arc, The Chauvel and the Brisbane Cinematheque, along with the volunteer film societies, which drew on on this, were the few attempts to deal with the problem, plaster on the cracks.

Programs, publications and screenings have been systematically whittled away from a very modest peak. This area was always seen as something to asset strip in the name of local production and, in parallel, it's preservation.

This is not just short sighted but stunningly naive. The Paris Film Museum's Henri Langlois, who faced similar pressure, understood this problem six decades back. He knew that it was not just sufficient to hold productions that could be entered into his data base and make his operation look imposing. "We cannot turn our Cinematheques into cemeteries" - it sounds better in French.

It was and is essential to spread awareness of the existence of historic materials and their part in a wider picture - their value. With all the short comings of his Cinémathèque Française, Langlois had it figured. The work had to be shown - under ideal conditions. Enthusiasts would watch it and ripple effect it outwards from those showings. It was because Langlois admired and repeatedly screened the then unknown NOSFERATU in his small screening room that it became a draw card there, in film museums round the globe and eighty years later you can buy it for a few dollars at your corner DVD store or stream it into your home computer. That story multiplied by thousands is the story of Cinematheques.

Not every one shared his point of view. The British Film Institute once hired in someone to tell them which of their Maurice Elvey films they could safely burn! It's not sufficient to have the work. You must deploy it or some bean counter will want the shelf space it occupies.

Which brings us to current situation where we learn that, as part of archive policy, the National Lending collection is about to close it's doors. Rough luck media courses, volunteer groups or anyone who wants to use what are often the only copies in the country. Feel confident that your tax payer dollars are being used instead to digitize local product into formats which are likely to be obsolete before the process is finished.

The mistake of putting archiving and screening under the same roof has been evident for some time.

This situation repeats the need for the action that has never materialized. Movie enthusiasts in Australia have a dreadful record as lobbyists and it's caught up with them - an echo of the Maurice Ogden poem "And where are the others that might have stood side by your side in the common good?" "Dead," I whispered; and amiably "Murdered," the Hangman corrected me... I did no more than you let me do." 

Barrie Patison 2014